Medicine and Shariah: A Dialogue in Islamic Bioethics

Aasim I. Padela

Hardback, 266 pages

9780268108373

Medicine and Shariah brings together experts from various fields, including clinicians, Islamic studies experts, and Muslim theologians, to analyze the interaction of the doctors and jurists who are forging the field of Islamic bioethics. Although much ink has been spilled in generating Islamic responses to bioethical questions and in analyzing fatwas, Islamic bioethics still remains an emerging field. How are Islamic bioethical norms to be generated? Are Islamic bioethical writings to be considered as part of the broader academic discourse in bioethics? What even is the scope of Islamic bioethics? Taking up these and related questions, the essays in Medicine and Shariah provide the groundwork for a more robust field.

The volume begins by furnishing concepts and terms needed to map out the discourse. It concludes by offering a multidisciplinary model for ethical deliberation that accounts for the various disciplines needed to derive Islamic moral norms and to understand biomedical contexts. In between these bookends, contributors apply various analytic, empirical, and normative lenses to examine the interaction between biomedical knowledge (represented by physicians) and Islamic law (represented by jurists) in Islamic bioethical deliberation.

By providing a multidisciplinary model for generating Islamic bioethics rulings, Medicine and Shariah provides the critical foundations for an Islamic bioethics that better attends to specific biomedical contexts and also accurately reflects the moral vision of Islam. The volume will be essential reading for bioethicists and scholars of Islam; for those interested in the dialectics of tradition, modernity, science, and religion; and more broadly for scholarly and professional communities that work at the intersection of the Islamic tradition and contemporary healthcare.